The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918 Page 24

  The Royal Flying Corps was being divorced from the army and reformed as a new service, the Royal Air Force. Edwin no longer wore his staff officer's pips.

  'I'd have thought that after the last jaunt, you'd wish never to go near an aeroplane again.'

  His face was set, his mind closed to her. 'Unfinished business in the air, Kate. I have to get back up there.'

  The sun came out and Edwin flinched. His eyes closed to slits. She knew, at once, why.

  There's a demon in the sky and I must kill him.'

  They stepped into the tangled shadow of a bare tree.

  'You've vampire blood in you,' she said.

  He nodded. 'A pilot I was shot down with. Albert Ball.'

  She had heard of Ball, a decorated ace.

  'Have you also given blood?'

  He shook his head. 'Ball died before I could help him. It was his last wish I taste his blood. I think he believed he'd live on through me.'

  'Now you're becoming a pilot?'

  There was a strength in his eyes. Still warm, he had the beginnings of the power of fascination.

  in the air, I know what to do. I don't know if it's natural ability or something Ball passed on, but I'm jumping through the hoops faster than the instructors can credit. It must be Ball. Or maybe fear has been burned out of me.'

  Kate was unsure about this new Edwin.

  By mid-morning, they had taken refuge in Edwin's billet in a small hotel entirely occupied by the British. His small room was on the fourth floor, directly under the roof. Its ceiling sloped like a tent. Thick blackout curtains hung over a gabled window. Daylight seeped around the edges.

  Kate sat on the narrow bed, pillows propped behind her. Edwin stood, head bowed by the ceiling.

  She was weaker than she had thought. Walking in the sunrise had tired her. She could hardly move. By contrast, Edwin was accelerated, gestures and thoughts faster than hers. It was as if she were the sluggish, docile, warm fool, and he the predatory vampire, darting round her defences. Perhaps it was Albert Ball in him. And the despairing, ruined Blighty cases in her.

  Edwin knelt and took her hand. A little of his vitality seeped into her. An attribute of her line was a minor facility for psychic vampirism, the ability to drain energy without tasting blood. Those who knew Frank Harris, even before his turning, said he was an exhausting experience.

  Edwin, to state the obvious, you're alone in your room with a woman.'

  He avoided her glance.

  'Aren't you supposed to be engaged?'

  Face down on the tiny bedside table was a photograph frame. A watch sat on it.

  'I'm dead to Catriona. The war has made living dead of us all. Until it's done, there can be nothing else.'

  He rose and sat beside her, still holding her hands. She heard his strong heartbeat. Her mind swam and she recalled falling under the spell of her father-in-darkness. Frank Harris's kisses were sour-sweet. Memory was blotted by a new taste.

  Edwin kissed her deferentially and took her glasses off. She took them from him and placed them next to his watch, nails brushing the hardboard backing of the unseen photograph. His huge eye was up close, a blur of liquid gleam. His lips fixed to hers.

  Without drawing blood, they drank from each other's mouth. His strength of purpose was a blast of wind against her face, streaming through her hair.

  Something of her flowed back into him. She sensed his electric tingling. With a smear of guilt, she had an impression from his memory of a girl she took to be Catriona. A tall, delicate, grey-eyed willow in a white dress and a straw hat. The impression faded. Kate was overwhelmed by a heat in her heart. She hugged Edwin, vampire strength coming back to her arms, squeezing breath out of him.

  They broke apart and went through the business of dispensing with clothes. Thirty years had brought merciful changes in fashion. In her warmth, undressing - even under circumstances which allowed full attention to be devoted to the chore - had been as complex a business as disassembling a rifle.

  Under his clothes, Edwin's body was a map: seas of pale skin, continents of blue-black bruise, islands of red weal, archipelagos of stitching, national boundaries of scar. An empire of injury. As she touched his wound-marks with fingers and tongue, he thrilled.

  He stroked her shoulders and breasts and belly, covering her with moustache-tickle kisses. The tiny scars of her warmth, from childhood play or spills off her bicycle, had vanished shortly after turning, but she was still freckled like an egg.

  With awkward shifting, they managed to get themselves side by side on the bed. Kate's back pressed up against the wall and Edwin's hip perched on the edge of the mattress. The space between them vanished. She felt his warmth against her from shins to neck. Her heart ached for his blood.

  She touched him intimately, forcing herself against instinct to be gentle. Through her palm, she felt the heat of his gathering blood. He shifted her under him and entered her suddenly. She reached above her head and gripped the bedstead. Her eyes were shut, but she saw clearly. Images leaked from Edwin's mind. Faces and fears.

  The heat built. Her fingernails were claws, hooked around the brass rails. Her fangs sprouted, forcing her mouth open. All her teeth were sharpened to points. She was dangerous to kiss. , 'Careful,'she said.

  His tongue flicked lightly against hers. Her arms seemed to become wings, cool air currents streaming over and under them. There was a great chasm of empty air beneath them, but they were sustained in flight. One drop of his blood now would explode in her mind. She would go down in flames. She tried to shut her mouth and swallow a scream.

  Edwin took her right wrist and tugged, detaching her hand from the headstead. Her claws screeched against the brass.

  'Be very careful.'

  He kissed her fingers, touching his tongue to her barb-like claws. He took hold of her forefinger as gently as she had taken hold of his penis, and touched its tip to the hollow of her throat. She spent, violently. Her free hand made a fist, crushing flat a brass tube.

  Edwin pricked her with her own fingernail. He punctured one of the tracery of blue veins in her chest. Scarlet blood welled and he pressed his mouth around the wound, suckling like a child.

  Waves of warmth and pain washed about her. She was helpless, feeling him in every inch of her. She wanted to warn him about her blood. He drank without regard. There was a disturbing purposefulness in his tapping of her. She had been seduced. This was not what she would have willed.

  Edwin gulped down swallows of her blood, then the urgency of his body overtook him. He held her close and spent inside her. The spreading warmth did not kill her red thirst.

  As a dead thing, Kate could not conceive a child this way. She could only have progeny through passing on her bloodline. She might still become mother to her lover.

  They lay together, one flesh, trickling into each other. A black dot of panic grew in Kate's mind. Edwin grew heavier on her. Sleep was overtaking him.

  She struggled out from beneath his pressing weight. The hole in her chest closed, leaving only a smear of blood on her freckled bosom. There was no scar. Edwin's lips were red with her vampire juice.

  She shook him.

  'Edwin, if you mean to turn, I must drink from you to complete the communion.'

  He moaned and his arms crossed over his throat, protective. Her blood matted his chest hair.

  'It's dangerous unless we go through it completely.'

  She had no children-in-darkness. She'd thought herself not old enough in undeath to be responsible. There were still too many things about her condition she didn't understand. Yet here she was, like a foolish warm girl overcome by passion, having to make a decision about motherhood in an inconvenient instant.

  Edwin's eyes opened.

  She wanted to drain him completely, to drink from him until his heart stilled, to watch over his corpse and coax him newborn into the moonlight.

  'Edwin, I'm sorry, but you leave me no choice.'

  The bones of her jaw unlocked as her mo
uth distended like a snake's. Extra fangs sprouted around the spurs of her incisors. She tasted her own blood-salted spittle.

  Edwin put out a hand, pressing his palm against her chest, fingers splaying.

  'No,' he said, weakly, 'no. Miss Mouse.'

  She was torn by duty and desire, which told her she must feed, and Edwin's own gathering strength.

  'You won't turn,' she said, words slurred by her fangs.

  He shook his head. 'You mustn't make me. I must be my own father. Kate, please.'

  He fell unconscious. His blood still raced, his heart beat strong and steady. She wanted to howl. He had unpenned the wolf in her, but would not let it feed. The room rippled, like a reflection in a disturbed pond. She was still troubled by sensations of flight and fire that spilled from his mind. She put on her spectacles and shut her eyes, trying to flush the wolf from her heart.

  She got off the narrow bed. Edwin stretched out, smiling. She shook, as cold and weak as after giving her blood to one of the patients. But this was a more complex transaction.

  If she were to ravish him as he slept, it would be understandable. Once turned, he would probably thank her. But there had been a force in his 'no', a determination.

  Her knees were unsteady. She sank into a corner, bony legs to her chest, and pulled her clothes around. Making a nest, she willed herself into lassitude. Iron bands tightened about her craving heart.

  31

  A Poet's Warrior

  There was whispering in the Château du Malinbois, rustling and cooing through passages and halls, slicing through cracks between great stone blocks. Poe's senses were ajangle with the murmurs of living and dead, the chattering of rats in the walls. He tried to shut out the eternal susurrus of words, words, words ...

  Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff visited his room to give him a greatcoat.

  in this fastness, even the dead feel the cold,' the intelligence officer explained.

  Poe accepted the gift with thanks. It was inches too long but of good quality, with a double row of shiny buttons. Rank insignia were unpicked from the shoulders.

  'We'll have you fit for inspection, Eddy.'

  'I was a good soldier, Theo. In wars fought before you were born. When alive, I served in the ranks and rose to sergeant by my own merits. As a new-born, I was an officer of the Confederacy.'

  'I did not think poets made good soldiers. All the regulations and impositions . .

  'When I first joined the army, I wished to take a holiday from poetic thought. And the war of Southern Independence was the poets' war, dreamers and idealists against factory-owners and puritans. Just as this is a poets' war.'

  Theo was surprised by the statement.

  'We fight for the future, Theo. The Graf von Dracula embodies the glories of the past but is not blinded by them. Under his standard, the world will change. To be a vampire is the essence of modernity.'

  The officer shrugged. 'You are a rare patriot.'

  'I see no other honourable choice.'

  Theo ambled about the room, trying to sneak a look at the papers on the desk. Poe instinctively hunched over, a schoolboy trying to prevent fellows seeing his work in an examination. The officer laughed at the game. Poe straightened and relaxed.

  'You've begun then? Ewers complains you drag your boots.'

  Theo's opinion of Hanns Heinz Ewers had not improved.

  *I have begun,' Poe admitted.

  'And is it a fine tale of blood and glory?'

  'It may be.'

  'Our hero is a strange beast?'

  'We are all strange beasts.'

  'You would do well in my job, Eddy. You give so little away. Just like our Red Baron.'

  Through a thousand fresh starts and strikings-out, Poe had assembled a patchwork of words and phrases into a chapter. Failing to find an avenue into Baron von Richthofen through the hero's own account, he had fallen back on his own impressions and sensibilities and constructed a narrative of his arrival at Malinbois, his first sight of the magnificent creatures of air and darkness.

  'You'll have more glories to chronicle soon. I have been overruled.'

  Theo argued in favour of deploying JG1 sparingly, believing the gradual spread of rumour would harry the Allies more effectively. He considered the shape-shifters a terror weapon, like gas. His belief was that JG1 were more useful for the enormous hurt they could do to enemy morale than for the limited, if impressive, damage they could inflict in the field.

  'We are soon to show our hand.'

  'A spring offensive?'

  Theo shrugged. 'The worst-kept secret in military history. How does one conceal a million men? The British and French will throw up twenty-foot-thick walls all along their lines and pour Yankees into every emplacement.'

  'Walls can be flown over.'

  Whispering still pestered his ears. There were conspiracies in every corner. Each man was his own conspiracy, against all others. Alliances shifted and reversed, policies evaporated and reformed, loyalties strained and snapped. In this whispering was weakness. If the Kaiserschlacht was to succeed, the Central Powers must be forged into an iron hammer. In this castle, individuals were unstable atoms, whirling against each other.

  'We shall have important visitors, I am told. You'll be close to the heart of things.'

  Poe had a sense of the moment. It was dizzying, a maelstrom of history.

  'Tonight, you should be in the tower. The Baron is going out. He will increase his score.'

  'You are here,' barked Ten Brincken as Poe stepped into the vaulted space. 'Good.'

  The professor, once suspicious, had been persuaded Poe's book would serve his lasting reputation. He was given to addressing himself to the poet, phrasing statements as if they were suitable for publication.

  Even wrapped in Theo's greatcoat (which, he realised, had come from the wardrobe of a dead officer), Poe was frozen. Exposed to homicidal winds, the tower was an arctic trap. Ice rinds mortared the walls. Every day, soldiers with mallets swarmed up scaffolding to knock off the night's icicles.

  Baron von Richthofen stood in the centre of the chamber, to attention, in human shape. Poe gave Richthofen a salute which was not returned. The flier wore a long, quilted dressing gown. Scientists swarmed around. Ten Brincken brusquely directed operations, a corrupt priest hurrying through a devotion. The professor's colleagues were a half-mystical lot, caught between mediaevalism and modernity. Dr Caligari, the alienist, was a fount of peculiar practice and arcane theory. He lurked shabbily in the jagged shadows, scrawling his notes in runic scribble.

  if you would be so gracious,' Ten Brincken addressed himself to Richthofen. 'Shift your shape.'

  Richthofen nodded curtly and removed his robe. A naked Siegfried, he closed his eyes in concentration. His attendants stood close by, bearing the apparatus to be piled on the night warrior. Kurten was bent under the weight of the Baron's guns.

  Something grew inside Richthofen. His shoulders broadened, his spine extended. He became wider and taller. Muscles swelled like wet sponges. Veins rose like firehoses under pressure. Fur swarmed over skin, coating now-leathery hide with a thick pelt. Bones distended, lengthened and reshaped. The face darkened. Horny skull-spurs prodded out around the eyes and the jaw. Bat-ears unfurled. The Baron's eyes opened, large as fists. The calm blue was unmistakable, a continuity between man and superman. Richthofen outstretched his changing arms. Joints grew spindly and sinewy as leather curtains fell, coalescing into wings.

  Ten Brincken consulted his pocket-watch. His shock-haired associate Rotwang wrote down a figure on a form.

  'Each time, Herr Poe, the process is more swift. Soon, it will bean eye-blink.'

  Kurten and Haarmann helped the changed Richthofen into his boots and, scrambling up a climbing frame to reach, hung the guns round his neck. With arms turned to wings, the Baron grew fresh arms. Less rudimentary than the last time Poe had seen the transformed flier. Now, they looked like real human arms, skinned in leather. The hands, flexible and four-fingered, got a grip
on the gun-handles. The barrels stuck up vertically.

  'His shape improves with each shift,' Ten Brincken explained. 'The ideal we have created becomes more perfectly attainable.'

  Poe heard the beating of the Baron's enlarged heart, a strong pulse.

  'Eventually this will be the true Baron von Richthofen. The mere human frame will be a disguise he may assume.'

  'Might the change become permanent?'

  Ten Brincken shook his head and grinned like a gorilla. 'Nothing will ever be permanent, Herr Poe. The forms of these creatures will forever be fluid. They will adapt to conditions wherever they are required to fight.'

  The Baron folded his wings, still at attention, and looked through the aperture in the tower walls. Out there, stars glinted like razor-edges. The camouflage netting blew in. A strong wind swept the floor of the tower room. Scientists clutched rebellious notes. Poe shivered in his coat.

  Ten Brincken and Rotwang circled the shape-shifted flier with prayerlike mutterings. Poe trailed after them, unable to resist the creature's pull. Manfred von Richthofen was no longer human. Animal smell seeped around him, raising tears in Poe's eyes and a sting in his nostrils. The musk was so strong it could be tasted like pepper.

  Poe tried to conceive of comparisons: a gargantuan gargoyle, a beast warrior, a killer angel, a Teuton demigod. None would do. As the Baron said, he was himself and that was all there was.

  The scientists backed away, leaving Poe at the giant's feet, looking up. The netting was removed from the aperture and Richthofen walked to the platform. His bootfalls shook the flagstones. Poe kept pace, striding in the shadow of the Baron's wings.

  Drawing his shoulders in and bowing his head, Richthofen eased through the gap in the wall and stood on the platform. His chest expanded. His wings filled out, air pouring into them.

  Poe followed, ignoring the windblast. The platform was suspended over empty space. Below was a sea of darkness. The stars mirrored in the lake were the only nearby indication of ground level. Fire-flashes marked out the trenches a few miles distant. Tiny screams persisted in the thunder of bombardment.